London had greeted news of the rise of the Mahdist Empire in the early 1880s with mild indifference. Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon‘s death in Khartoum in 1885 had embarrassed Gladstone, who had ordered Gordon to evacuate the garrison, not perish with it. But, generally speaking, the death of a soldier at the hands of savages, while regrettable, was treated as an occupational hazard. The arrival of the Marchand expedition at Fashoda in 1898 abruptly changed the equation. News of a French rival at Fashoda precipitated the British advance to preempt a French claim on the upper Nile.
‘The Flight of the Khalifa after his Defeat at the Battle of Omdurman, 2 September 1898′ by Robert Kelly.
Western invaders had been successful during this phase of imperial warfare basically because, unlike the American or South American revolutions, or the Mexican resistance to the French, indigenous societies lacked the power or the cohesion to resist their persistent encroachment. Also, for most of the nineteenth century, rival imperial powers refrained from coming to the aid of the indigenous fighters, beyond selling them a few surplus rifles. So small wars remained small. The most persistent rivalry was between Britain and France, and in 1898 it nearly erupted into war. Paris had been particularly irked when the British had occupied Egypt in 1882 and declared it a protectorate. The southern frontier of Egypt was somewhat in dispute, however, after the British abandoned the upper Nile to the Sudanese Mahdi and his successors in 1885. Therefore, the upper Nile was effectively unoccupied by a European power. In 1896, French colonialists dispatched Colonel Jean-Baptiste Marchand with a handful of French marine officers and around 200 hand-picked Senegalese riflemen up the mouth of the Congo River. Two years and 3,000 miles later, Marchand reached the Nile at a placed called Fashoda, a small collection of mud buildings several hundred miles upriver from Khartoum. With as much ceremony as they could muster, the French broke out the white dress uniforms which they had brought for this occasion, and planted their tricolour flag. France had reasserted her historic claims on the Nile.
The bellicose colonialist in charge of the British Colonial Office, Joseph Chamberlain, was in no mood to tolerate a French attempt to work its way back into Egypt and threaten British control of the Suez Canal. Already, a British-Egyptian expedition had begun to encroach on the Mahdi’s empire. On 1 September 1898, General Horatio Kitchener arrived at Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, with a force of over 20,000 men, gunboats mounting 100 guns, and a vast supply convoy of camels and horses. On the following morning at dawn, in the shadow of the great dome of the Mahdi’s tomb, 50,000 Sudanese tribesmen in a line four miles long attacked the British. They were massacred. As Kitchener surveyed the 10,000 bodies that lay in piles over the desert, he was handed an envelope with urgent orders from England to proceed up the Nile in all haste to dislodge a French force at Fashoda. Kitchener gathered two battalions of Sudanese, one hundred Cameron Highlanders, a battery of artillery and four Maxim guns in five riverboats which steamed under an Egyptian flag. As Kitchener approached Fashoda on 18 September, he sent a messenger with an invitation for Marchand to dine aboard his flagship. With great courtesy, Kitchener, wearing an Egyptian fez, complimented the French colonel on his splendid march, but added that he must protest the French presence on the Nile. The Frenchman replied that he intended to defend himself if attacked. The two men agreed to allow their respective governments to sort out matters.
The Fashoda crisis was eventually resolved, but not without acrimony. The press of the two countries swapped vituperative insults. The French moved reinforcements to their Mediterranean coast and made plans to defend Corsica, which they calculated the British would attack if war came. Eventually the French gave way. Marchand was in an impossible situation. He struck his colours on 11 December 1898. However, he declined the British offer to exit via a Nile steamer and instead marched to the Red Sea where his expedition was collected by a French warship. The Fashoda crisis did have a silver lining for French colonialists, however. Quiet negotiations between London and Paris eventually culminated in the signing of the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which bartered British recognition of a French free hand in Morocco against Parisian acquiescence to London’s domination of Egypt. Yet the fact that the two greatest colonial powers had nearly gone to war over a flyblown sand-bank on the upper Nile was, for many; a wake-up call. ‘We have behaved like madmen in Africa,’ French President Felix Faure complained in the wake of the Fashoda crisis, ‘led astray by irresponsible people called the colonialists.’
19th Century Sudan Wargames Armies 1883-1885
